While the results of your survey certainly depend on the quality of your call lists and the eagerness of your recipients to take your survey, the following statistics are provided as a guide to help you plan. The statistics are based on a number of different Gigabark users who have run different types of surveys.

Roughly 50% of calls which are answered are answered by ahuman This is important for survey broadcasts because you can’t collect input from a voicemail box. After millions of calls, we have seen broadcasts where as few as 35% of completed calls were answered by a human, and broadcasts where as many as 65% of answered calls were answered by a human. Many factors influence this percentage (and are discussed in another article), but include the time of day of the broadcast, the day of the week, the quality, source, and freshness of the recipient list, etc.

Of human answered calls, roughly 16% of those humans respond to the first question. Again, many factors might influence this percentage, including the length of the survey introduction, the length of the question, the eagerness of your recipients, whether you tell them how long the survey is, etc.

Approximately 1%-4% of respondents will hang up after each question. Again, this is a wide range with multiple influences. How long is each question (one survey of note asked respondents at the start for a 1-5 rating of each option and then breezed through 20 options and saw 2% hang up after the first question, and about 0.3% hang up after each question, with 12.2% responding to all 20 questions).